JohnBeckett/Editor guidelines

Editors should not overly worry about procedures: just do what you think is best and we'll let you know if we think you should do it differently next time.

The Community Portal (which has a link in the sidebar) is a good place to start. It includes a link to our policy introduction (which is actually some "how to" guidelines). Please read the guidelines, not just the following!

I might put more informal information on various procedures here. Feel free to fix problems or add more.

Remove {{review}} if you are confident that the advice in a tip is good and that it should work. Preferably, you would test that the tip does work, but if you are very confident, that is probably enough. A reviewed tip does not need to be perfect (it may have a couple of "todo" or other comments). By removing review you are saying that the tip is not misguided, and is in a fit state to be read (it does not have bad advice, and does not have a lot of comments, particularly conflicting comments).

Also remove review if flagging a tip as merged (it's a bit confusing having "this tip has been merged" and "this tip needs review").

We prefer to merge high-numbered tips to the tip with the lowest tip number on the basis that the first tip created has a prior claim, and in an ideal world, the later tips would have been merged into the first tip instead of being created as separate tips. There are exceptions, particularly if the first tip is misguided.

The important point is to not remove useful information:

If a point made in a tip is not relevant, do not delete it unless it is unhelpful. You can move irrelevant but possibly useful text to the bottom of the comments with a note that the information may be moved elsewhere later.

When merging tips, you may find more than one approach to solving a problem. We like simplicity and prefer to keep only what works. However, we also want to avoid deleting useful information, so consider whether the second approach (perhaps abbreviated) should be included.

Do not take this advice too far: the perfect is the enemy of the good, and if some incidental info is omitted, that is too bad. Also, if severe pruning is necessary to make a tip useful, it is better to do that now than to wait for someone to fix it in the distant future.

We only delete a tip if it really is unhelpful and we don't have another similar tip. Suppose tip 101 and tip 102 cover roughly the same topic, using different methods. We might decide that 102 is completely superfluous (maybe Vim 7 does not require its hacks, or perhaps 101 has been improved so it's much better than 102). Even if we just want to delete 102, we would still declare that 102 has been merged into 101. When processed, the title for 102 will become a redirect to the title of 101, and VimTip102 will be replaced with a message saying to see VimTip101. Also, it's much more friendly to the author of a tip to find that their work has been merged rather than deleted.

With the above example, after confirming that all useful info from 102 is in 101, you would put {{merged|101}} at the top of 102 (replacing {{review}} if present).

If merging all information from 102 into 101, put an edit summary on the addition to 101 like "merge in from 102 by X", replacing X with the author of 102. That is to give credit.